Retired CIA Agent Confirms They’ve Been Hiding Bigfoot Since 1973 – Shocking Sasquatch Story

The Last Secret of Site 17

My name is Tony Carmichael. I turned seventy-three last month. Stage four pancreatic cancer. They gave me two weeks, maybe three. I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1971 until I retired in 2003. Thirty-two years of classified assignments, foreign ops, domestic surveillance. I signed papers that said I’d take certain secrets to my grave. But there’s one I can’t. Not anymore.

In the fall of 1973, I was stationed at a facility in northern Idaho that doesn’t appear on any map. We called it Site 17. What we guarded there, what the government has kept hidden for over fifty years, changes everything people think they know about Bigfoot. I saw them. Multiple specimens—alive, intelligent, contained behind electrified fencing and armed patrols. I even spoke to one. This is what they don’t want you to know.

I joined the agency fresh out of college in ’71. Georgetown, political science, recommendations from two professors with connections. Desk work at first, analyzing Soviet communications, logging intercepts. Tedious pattern recognition that weeds out anyone without patience. I was good at it. Kept my head down, followed protocols, never asked questions above my clearance level.

By early 1973, I’d earned a reputation as reliable, the kind of agent you assign when discretion matters more than ego. That’s probably why they picked me for Site 17, though they didn’t call it that at first. My section chief called me into his office on a Tuesday morning in September. Closed the door, told me I was being reassigned to a long-term domestic posting. High security, extreme isolation, no communication with family for the first six months.

Where? I asked. He slid a file across his desk. Northern Idaho, wilderness area. You’ll receive full briefing on site. I remember the way he wouldn’t meet my eyes when he said it, like he was apologizing for something he couldn’t name. I took the file. Inside was a single topographical map with a red circle drawn around nothing. Just forest, no towns, no roads marked, grid coordinates, elevation data, and one handwritten note: Biological containment level five classification.

I flew into Spokane three days later. A driver met me at a private hangar. No ID, no small talk, just a nod toward a black Suburban. We drove for four hours into the Bitterroot range, the roads getting narrower and rougher until they weren’t roads at all, just gravel paths carved between Douglas firs. I remember rain, constant cold September rain that turned the windshield into gray static.

We stopped at a checkpoint I never saw coming, just a gate across the path with two guards in civilian clothes carrying M16s. They checked my credentials against a manifest, waved us through. Another hour of driving. The trees pressed in tighter. No signs, no markers, just the sense of going deeper into somewhere people weren’t supposed to be.

Site 17 appeared suddenly. A cluster of prefab buildings surrounded by a twelve-foot chain link fence topped with razor wire. Generators hummed in the background. Floodlights on poles every thirty yards. Even though it was barely afternoon, the perimeter stretched back into the forest farther than I could see, following the natural curve of a valley I hadn’t noticed until we were inside it.

The driver parked near the largest building and pointed. “Check in there. Commander Hackett will brief you.” I stepped out into the rain. The smell hit me immediately. Something wrong. Something organic and wild underneath the diesel fumes and wet metal. Like a zoo, but heavier. More primal.

Inside, the building was standard military gray. Concrete floors, flickering fluorescent lights, the kind of institutional blankness that said temporary, even though I’d learn later the site had been active since 1967.

Commander Hackett was waiting in what passed for a conference room. Mid-fifties, Marine Corps background, the kind of face that had stopped showing emotion years ago. He didn’t shake my hand, just gestured to a chair.

“You’ve been read into the existence of this facility,” he said, “but not its purpose.”

I sat. “Biological containment was all they told me.”

“Cryptid containment,” he corrected. “Specifically, specimens classified under Project Granite Shadow. You’re familiar with the term Bigfoot?”

I thought he was joking. I actually laughed, a short bark of disbelief. Then I saw his face.

“You’re serious?”

“We currently house four specimens,” Hackett continued, ignoring my reaction. “Two adult males, one adult female, one juvenile. They’ve been in captivity for periods ranging from eighteen months to six years. Your job is perimeter security and specimen observation. You will not discuss what you see here with anyone outside this facility. You will not photograph, record, or document anything without direct authorization. Violation of these terms carries a minimum twenty-year federal sentence. Do you understand?”

I understood the words. I didn’t understand anything else.

“Where did they come from?”

“The Pacific Northwest. We receive reports, sightings, encounters, physical evidence. When possible, we contain. When not possible, we suppress.”

He stood and walked to a wall-mounted map showing the valley and surrounding wilderness. Red zones marked the containment areas.

“You’ll start on perimeter duty tonight, 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. You’ll be briefed on protocols before your shift.”

Questions. I had a thousand. I asked none of them, just nodded.

“Good. Welcome to Site 17, Agent Carmichael.”

They issued me rain gear, a radio, a sidearm. I was told never to fire near the containment zones and handed a laminated card with emergency protocols. I spent the afternoon in a room watching orientation videos that felt like government training films from the ’50s. Grainy footage of forested perimeters, chainlink barriers, procedures for lockdowns and breach responses. Not once did they show the actual specimens.

My shift started at dusk. I was partnered with an agent named Kowalski who’d been at the site for nine months. We walked the northern perimeter, a path that ran parallel to the electrified fence line, just close enough to hear the hum of current through the wiring.

“You’ll hear them at night,” Kowalski said, not looking at me. “Vocalizations. Don’t react. Don’t shine your light into the containment area unless you see a breach. They don’t like the lights.”

“What do they do?”

“Scream. Howl. Sometimes it sounds like they’re talking to each other. Sometimes it sounds almost human.”

He paused, adjusted his rain hood. “You’ll get used to it.”

We walked in silence for maybe twenty minutes. The rain had softened to mist, and the forest around us was alive with the small sounds of dripping water, wind through branches. Then I heard it—a low, resonant call from somewhere deep in the containment zone. Not quite a roar, not quite a moan. Something between animal and human vocal range and so loud I felt it in my chest. Kowalski kept walking like he hadn’t heard anything. Another call answered the first, higher pitched from a different direction. Then a third, the juvenile I’d learn later, with a sound that was almost plaintive. They were communicating. Whatever language it was, it had structure, rhythm, intention.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” Kowalski said. “That’s what everyone says the first night.”

We completed the circuit without incident. Four hours of walking in wet darkness, listening to sounds that shouldn’t exist. When our shift ended, I went to my assigned quarters, a small room in the barracks building with a cot, a desk, a lamp. I lay there staring at the ceiling, hearing those calls echo in my memory.

I kept thinking about Hackett’s words. We contain. We suppress. How many people knew? How long had this been going on? And what were we supposed to do with creatures that were clearly intelligent, clearly aware they were imprisoned?

I didn’t sleep that night. Not at all.

The second week at Site 17, they moved me to dayshift perimeter observation. That’s when I first saw them clearly, not through fence wire at night, but in full afternoon light. The main containment zone was a natural clearing ringed by old growth forest, maybe three acres total, divided by internal fencing into separate areas for each specimen. The setup reminded me of a prison yard.

The adult male in zone A was massive. I’d read the briefing files—eight foot two, estimated weight four hundred pounds. But numbers don’t prepare you for the physical reality. He sat near the fence line, back against a Douglas fir, watching the perimeter with dark, intelligent eyes. His fur was reddish brown, matted in places from the constant rain. His hands were enormous, human-shaped but scaled up, resting on his knees in a posture that was disturbingly familiar.

I watched him for ten minutes from my observation post. He never moved, just sat there breathing, watching the guards walk their routes. There was something in his stillness that made my skin crawl. Not because he seemed dangerous, but because he seemed aware. Aware of his captivity. Aware of us. Aware, maybe, that this would never end.

The logs called him specimen A1. Captured in October 1971 near the Oregon-Washington border after multiple sightings in the same area. The capture operation took six months of planning and a team of twelve agents. They used tranquilizer darts designed for elephants. It took four hits to bring him down.

I started reading everything I could access about the specimens. The files were incomplete, sections redacted, entire pages missing. But what remained told a pattern. The government had been tracking Bigfoot sightings since the late ’40s. The Patterson-Gimlin film in ’67 had triggered something, some decision at a level above my clearance. By 1968, there was a directive. Contain, don’t kill. Study, document, keep it quiet.

Site 17 wasn’t the only facility. There were references to locations in Washington, Northern California, Montana. How many specimens total? The files didn’t say. How many sightings were real versus misidentification? No data, just years of reports, field observations, blurry photographs marked authentic or hoax in red ink.

Every few pages, the word appeared—Bigfoot, sometimes Sasquatch. The analysts used both terms interchangeably, clinically, like they were describing a known species. Because to them, it was.

The secret wasn’t whether Bigfoot existed. The secret was that we’d been catching them, studying them, hiding them for years, and the public had no idea.

By my third month at Site 17, I’d been rotated through every position on the duty roster. Perimeter patrol, observation post, supply check, maintenance oversight. They wanted everyone cross-trained in case of emergency. I learned the rhythms of the place. Morning feeding at 0600, raw fish, berries, vegetation brought in from outside the immediate area, veterinary checks every week, behavioral documentation every shift.

The specimens had patterns, too. The adult male in zone A walked the fence line exactly twice per day, morning and evening, always the same route. The female in zone C spent hours building structures from branches and stones, crude arrangements that looked almost like shelters or markers. The juvenile stayed close to the female, rarely venturing to the far side of his enclosure. They were adapting. That was what disturbed me most—not resisting, not trying to escape, just adapting to captivity like any intelligent creature would.

I watched the male learn which guards would look at him and which wouldn’t. I watched the female test the fence current with a stick before touching it. I watched the juvenile mimic guard movements during patrols, walking the same routes we walked, stopping where we stopped.

One afternoon in late November, I was manning the observation post overlooking zone A when the male approached the fence directly below me. He’d never done that before. Usually, he kept his distance, maintaining the careful buffer between himself and human presence. He stood there maybe fifteen feet away and looked up at me. Direct eye contact, unblinking. I saw intelligence in those eyes. Not animal cunning, but something deeper—understanding, recognition of his situation, maybe even judgment.

I should have reported it. That was protocol. Any unusual specimen behavior got logged immediately, but I didn’t move. We just stared at each other for what felt like minutes, but was probably thirty seconds. Then he made a sound, low and controlled, not a vocalization like the nighttime calls, but something deliberate, almost like he was trying to speak.

I heard footsteps behind me. Kowalski checking in for shift rotation.

“They do that sometimes,” he said quietly. “Try to communicate. We’re not supposed to respond.”

The male tilted his head slightly, still watching me. Then turned and walked back to his usual spot by the tree. The moment was over, but something had changed. I couldn’t see these creatures as specimens anymore. They were people. Different, yes. Nonhuman, technically, but people.

That night, I wrote a letter I never sent, addressed to my sister in Maryland, explaining where I was and what I’d seen. I got three paragraphs in before I realized how insane it sounded. There’s a secret government program that’s been capturing Bigfoot for years. I’m guarding them in Idaho. They’re intelligent. They’re suffering.

I burned the letter in the metal trash can in my quarters. Watched the paper curl and blacken. Kept the secret like I’d been trained to do.

Now, at the end, I’m breaking that silence. Bigfoot exists. We’ve contained them, studied them, lied about them. They’re not monsters. They’re not myths. They’re people. And we failed them.

Whatever comes next isn’t something I’ll live to see. But at least I won’t die protecting the lie.